


She is my Apocrypha

by Unquiet_Grave



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5, Far Cry: New Dawn
Genre: Beautiful trash, Canon-Typical Violence, Elements, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fate & Destiny, Funeral Sex is not Recommended, Healing Through the Power of Dysfunctionality, Idiots in Love, Nature, Neither is Saying 'I Love You' the First Time, New Dawn AU, New Dawn References, Non-Linear Narrative, Possessive Behavior, Possessive Sex, Soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:07:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22449934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unquiet_Grave/pseuds/Unquiet_Grave
Summary: “You’re doing this. You are the ringleader. You know how it stops, don’t you?”"How?”At last, a genuine response. She bit her lip.“Come see me,” she pleaded quietly.**She was always meant for him, a space he would write into his long and complicated story.Always and forever, his.Even if the rest of the universe didn't see it that way.
Relationships: Female Deputy | Judge/Joseph Seed, Joseph Seed/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 32





	1. A Vision of After, Before

_There was a door to something so pure  
_ _A spark was there  
_ _Waiting for someone like me  
_ _Someone so far from home_

_I found a window  
_ _Water like crystal  
_ _The clearest thing I've seen  
_ _I couldn't look away_

-’Friedrichschain’, Chelsea Wolfe

**

“All great and precious things are lonely.”

-John Steinbeck, _East of Eden_

* * *

Before she fell in love with him—and their lives went to hell in a handbasket—she fell in love with his home. With Montana. That cauldron of conflict, the wildflower country he and his followers claimed as their new Eden.

One might say they were one and the same to her: Joseph Seed and Hope County.

The forested mountains, the regal, gold-crested valleys, the congregations of birds and beasts, the court of fish and insects, the cradle of earth teeming with life and possibility, the power and violence of predators and the grace and beauty of prey, the serenity and passion of life cycles, the grief and horror of savage death, the condensation on a cold glass of beer at the end of a hard day’s work.

She saw those things, when she looked at him.

When she wasn’t aiming at his skull through the sight of her pistol, of course.

For a man who detested worldliness, he was the land and the land was him. A collection of elements she could belong to, could worship, if he could be understood.

Tamed. The way she was endlessly seeking to tame and surmount those lovely, volatile lands.

When Joseph looked upon her for the first time, striding across the scuffed wooden floorboards, state-issued handcuffs jangling on her hip, amber incense and gunpowder hanging heavy in the air, he did not see a woman standing there before him.

He saw a window.

He had gazed straight through time and saw, for once, not **the** future but the one he **needed** for himself, _no matter the cost_.

And that cost damn-near ruined him.

It would wreck so many things. Break them on shallow rocks, to be swallowed whole.

Once the bombs crashed and transformed the treasure state into a land of butchered trees, there was nothing left for her to love. Not a single blade of grass or drop of water or bird twittering sweetly in the needled branches. No promise of the wind whipping her hair as the sunkissed road unfurled, like a sidewinder at dusk, into the dappled shadows of the Whitetails.

Only metal and concrete, an iron lung tethering her to a life she detested. Mechanical air, manufactured light.

Because of _his prophecy_ , her precious heartlands were thrown, dashed open on the rocks, and her heart split asunder with them. So much that she felt she would _die_ of emptiness in that _hellhole_ he’d dragged her inside.

For a time, grief-stricken and traumatized, he _was_ a demon. He made her feel things she would never want to feel again.

Ruthless and claustrophobic as it was, the hellhole would save their lives. And he was there to pick up the broken pieces of her.

In darkness, his voice became the calm, measured voice of the land. A promise of dawn, of a return. He sang her a song of spring while all around them winter consumed the old world.

They **would** love a lifetime. See each other through the end of an age, as husband and wife, prophet and bodyguard, Father and Judge, into the birth of a new one, and the wars that would be fought for their children. Claim some of them, too.

But first they would **hate**. Oh, how they would abhor one another.

A lifetime’s worth of grudges. A purging of their souls before they fled underground and became more than enemies or lovers or friends.

They became a vision, and visions are eternal.

Destiny.

But we all know how cruel and unusual a mistress _she_ can be.

Almost as cruel as Montana herself, when the mood suits her.


	2. Of Water

From birth she was a waterbaby, and thus a terror to her parents (a theme that would carry through her life, terrorizing folk with her ‘zest’).

The moment her chubby toddler legs motored in the water she wanted to do nothing more than to be in it.

Even if she didn’t know to swim.

She would dive (in other words, _flop_ ) into above-ground pools, streams, the tub, buckets—anything that went _splash!_ , and her parents would yank her out, sputtering, by the collar. Near-drowned as a wet dog, but she never learned. Went in headfirst, every time.

Eventually swimming came natural to her and she would insist she had _known_ all along. 

She was, in short, stubborn, and a bit of a liar.

**

He, on the other hand, viewed water as a tool, as a means to purification, travel, food and replenishment. As a barrier, the way the lake was a natural one to his chapel island. The addition of the barbed wire fence was more about the message: no one leaves or enters without his permission.

Not without pain and blood, did you doubt Joseph Seed.

From the shore, he watched the Deputy and the heathen woman with the bow reach the tip of Dutch’s island. Doing as she damn-well pleased, her only barrier, the unusual circumstances that bound her to this land.

To him. His family, his flock.

He had walked out there, on his neighboring island, to think. To be alone and pray on this very issue, and _now_ the ‘issue’ was gallivanting with her friend a five-minute boat ride away.

_Weeks of hunting her with his wolves. Another with her in a cage, then not. All that blood spilled and resources shot away._

_...And all I had to do was walk to the water._

He raised his clear blue eyes to the sky, squinting beneath his yellow aviators.

_Lord, you are indeed mysterious. Your depths go to places I cannot know._

_Grant me some understanding. Some clarity._

He did not react to her sudden materialization. Nothing...save for a faint smile, gradually playing across his scruffy lips.

Standing there, under the partial shade of an enormous, ancient Douglas fir, he reflected on the times he and his brothers went down to the creek to fetch water, escape the heat, flip rocks and dig for crayfish, typical boy things tainted by the stain of their painful childhood.

But only slightly. There was still a rose tint to his nostalgia. The creek had always made Joseph feel at ease. It had come from somewhere else and was flowing elsewhere, away from their broken home.

One day they would, too. He had _known_ this.

“You have _got_ to be kidding,” he murmured softly.

He stood flabbergasted with the sun crisping his left shoulder, the rosary dangling at his side, wondering if he knew _anything_.

Because that damned woman, though far away, was running straight at him.

Naked as the day is long.

**

“What’n the _hell_ are you thinkin’?”

Jess Black bawled after her as she went gunning into the lake. A centipede of filthy, bloodstained rags that were once a cute halter top, jeans, and undergarments left in her wake.

 _Ew._ Jess wrinkled her scarred nose...then stifled a snort as the Deputy slipped and let loose a string of curses that would have made the Father see fifty shades of red.

“I’ve been trapped in those cages for a week!” the Deputy whooped over her shoulder. ““I need a bath!”

Jess rolled her eyes.

“Ya _need_ some goddamned sense.”

“You’re probably ri-FUCK, that’s _cold_!”

Jess scoffed, lingering on the soft sands, keeping watch for Peggie water patrols while the Deputy played _Bay Watch_ in a literal warzone.

She plunged in up to her chest. Not a soul around, and she took the chance and, well, _flop_. The only noises, the trickling of water and locusts buzzing in the reeds. The hot afternoon sun set the glassy waters aflame with glimmering motes of brass and gold. But the temperature, now that was another story. Things were getting peaky, to say the least. The seaweed tickled her ankles and she squished freezing mud between her toes.

Her skin broke into goosebumps as she floated with a peaceful smile on her face. She inhaled the scent of fish and algae and grass, distant campfire smoke. 

And it was _heavenly_.

Salmon glided past her without care in the world, their silvery scales like underwater gems. Gems she wanted to yank out and throw on a spit. She was hungry, _starving_ actually, but the lake was a necessary detour.

She _had_ to get the blood off her. All the gunpowder. The stink of wolves. 

Jacob.

For a few solemn moments, the world shrank. She was nothing but a 27-year-old pilgrim floating in a cool void to the ethereal melody of summer insects and birds. She leaned on her back and shut her eyes.

Opened them. Stared at an expanse of blue sky turned nearly shock-white with clouds. Bone white. Corpse white. White as wolf fur.

Her breath snared. She sank under.

Into the cold dark, where her spine rested against a hard surface, where the shivering and teeth-clattering and moans and howls never ceased.

Strong hands seized her, yanking her upwards.

She went gasping in the sunlight, which was suddenly blinding, and gazed into the concerned face of-

-the hooded Jess Black, her heavy clothes billowing in the water.

“Hey. You okay?”

“Yeah,” she sputtered. Wiped fishy water from her eyes, her head pounding.

“Just got tired there, for a minute.”

“Sure. Right.”

Jess pursed her scarred lip. The two women fell into a somber silence. Locusts droned. Trout swam in lazy circles.

The trail of her bloody clothes festered and rotted in the sun, drawing flies. Evil memories no amount of Jack and Cokes, prayers and baptisms, or Bliss-lobotomies would erase.

“Know what? Fuck it,” Jess laughed.

She found a rock to stand on and began stripping out of her cloak, her clothes.

Before the Deputy knew it, she was joining her in her birthday suit in all that freezing, liquid fire, and the two splashed and squawked at each other like a pair of hens, making jokes about John soaring overhead.

“If I see that stupid plane of his, I’m usin’ my incendiary rounds,” Jess boasted, miming drawing and shooting at the sky. "BOOM! Hope ya like fried hypocrite."

The Deputy followed her invisible line of fire. Nothing up there but an osprey, turning over and over in wide circles. Watching the strange, loud, featherless creatures in the water.

Its shadow passed over her face in a slow, sluggish line, before wheeling eastward.

She sucked a bunch of water in her mouth and spit in its general dirction. Then she spit more at Jess, who swore and splashed her in the face.

" _Fuck_ _off_. What are you, twelve? I rescue you from Jacob and you repay me by skinny dipping near Joe's bunker?"

The Deputy winced, and not just from all the cold water on the tapestry of hurt Jacob visited on her holy temple.

"I _do_ feel twelve, sometimes. And Joe is probably off doing a sermon on a mount. You know, come to think of it, I don't think your arrow would reach John's plane. Not unless it was flying super low,” she told Jess haltingly, unaware of how scattered she sounded.

She hoisted herself out to sunbathe on a boulder, her inky hair dripping down her sore back. She groaned, absorbing the heat like an iguana. She would _never_ tire of this, the August sun baking her tanned olive skin. Not after the Whitetails. She knew she was being stupid, but she _needed_ this. Needed absurdity.

To just be. To _flow_.

Jess treaded water beside her quietly. She did not join her on the rock, preferring not to stretch her hide out for all of Eden’s Gate to see.

“Yeah, well, you flash the bastard, and I’ll shoot,” Jess said.

She grinned from her spot on the rock and stood up. Her wet body left a vague ghost of herself.

“Deal.”

She dove back in, and the two swam to shore, headed for the Holland Valley, where they hoped their luck would improve.

The Deputy had a feeling about John. She would start with him, with the river and the skies. Water and air, the two more merciful elements in her book.

Jacob, all rugged mountains and timber wolves and stony earth that had made it damn near impossible to dig graves, had been a mistake.

She put on fresh clothes from Jess’s pack and left the bloody rags where they lay.

**

He should call his men to detain her, send them out on boats. Instead he let them go, with nary a scratch on their heads.

His own mind felt riddled with static. His chest heaved and his belly filled with unsettled fire.

All he had done was see her body.

Her curves and tones, dips and swells and places that could _eventually_ swell, rather pleasingly so. How impossibly **dark** her thick, shoulder-length hair got, in the water, and it was already black as wet ink. With that skin and those eyes, she had Native American or Greek blood for sure.

He wasn’t certain which gods she belonged to, and from what Jacob told him about her frenzied, warrior fighting style, the degree to which she resisted his programming, he would _never_ be able to rip the pagan out of her.

...Which meant the mission he gave John was folly. His dear younger brother was in for a whopping dose of failure, and John was already so sensitive, so _reactionary_ when he didn’t get his way.

She was going to be the death of him. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Nothing.

Maybe, if he got her alone instead, ordered a secret meeting at night, maybe...

He was distantly aware that he was hard, even with all the dread over his little brother. Watching her, how the sun had gleamed on her dew-kissed breasts, had awoken something in him which he hadn’t felt since the first time he saw his late wife.

It suffocated and smothered his soul, doused him in torment and lit a match out of spite.

He swallowed and wiped his forehead with the back of a tattooed hand, hot and thirsty and surrounded by water, water, everywhere.

“No.

I will not.”

He closed his hand around the rosary and vowed then and there not to quench his thirst. Or relieve any other urges surging in his bloodstream.

Hidden by the shade, alone, but painfully aroused nonetheless. Her naked brazen form, a graven image no amount of self-flagellation could remove.

Not even his fear for poor John.

So he turned the whip of God’s ire on others. Ordered the execution of three hostages from Fall’s End who refused to convert, despite John’s best ministrations, along with the public crucifixion and disembowelment of a man caught stealing rations and a woman, a drug addict, who refused to work. She died begging for one more hit instead of her life, as they usually did.

He was done letting sinners off easy for the day, and he found the justice gave him some form of respite.

But it was an island shrinking in a rapidly-rising ocean. He was drowning.

The only way he can get air now is through those lips that offend and entice him so.

Her initial shock at the state of Eden’s Gate was wearing off, though. Every day she spent there was another hardship, another heartbreak. In place of her shock, something _ugly_ was taking root, filling her to the brim with wrath.

And that ugliness had a face.

A beguiling one with blue eyes as hypnotic and treacherous as the Mediterranean before a storm.


	3. Of Air

Innocence,  
you’ll never be mine

-NERO

* * *

_He swam out to that rock, oh yes he did._

_Golden rays crystallized droplets to amber, anointing his bare chest and arms in solar oils and radiance. A pyre towered in his core in the shape of a reclining woman, who was supposed to be the end of everything. The inferno in the tower of Babylon._

_So why all this dread whispering that something was beginning?_

_Slowly he lay down in her shadow, where she had blessed the burning rock. Joseph stared at the cloudy sky. Anticipating a spark to send him up in flames. He clutched his cross and shut his eyes._

_Peace washed over him. Serene. Temporary._

_Overhead, a bald eagle cackled and landed in her nest. She spread her stately wings, sunning herself, panting. Shameless and proud._

_He had forgotten such a feeling. Had he ever truly known it? An old friend he hadn’t seen in a lifetime, a prayer snatched by the wind._

_Was it the same for her? Did she think of him, as often as he thought of her?_

I cannot have this.

 _The sun glare intensified, and he put an arm over his eyes. He had suspected and then denied what he’d glimpsed through that window. Now he knew._ _And he would climb through and grasp it, if it meant falling to his death._

_He went to the shore, retracing her footprints in the mud. He told hers apart from the heathen girl’s short, quick-footed ones by the wide arrogance of her stride. Gathering her bloody rags that reeked of suffering and strife and his brother’s Pride, he took them and threw them with disgust in the brazier of his chapel._

_In the sweltering heat he wiped his brow and watched them dissolve, sending up a signal. In all that roiling gray he saw many things._

_The guard came in and woke him up._

_“Father, they have spotted the sinner! She’s-”_

_"-in the woods,” he interrupted, “near John’s bunker, dressed as a civilian, in a red cap and flannel. Violet, I think it was.”_

_“Forgive me, Joseph. But how could you have known that?”_

_He didn’t answer, rising swiftly with the smoke. He clutched his rosary until his knuckles whitened._

_“It doesn’t matter. Make haste and take me there. Let’s see if we can lure this snake out of Eden.”_

_**_

The skies served as the mana of birds and flying creatures. Such delicate, melodious things, with their hollow bones and Ivy League law degrees. Pretty, pleasing to the eyes, even awe-inspiring in their feats, but their love and dependency on the skies rendered them a special kind of vulnerable, when they crashed. 

A strutting peacock could splay his feathers, peck with his sharp beak, puff out his chest all day, making a royal spectacle of himself, but no one will heed his shrieks and warbles and threats over the radio. At the end of said day, a peacock was just a noisy bag of feathers.

John Seed was a peacock-turned-bird of prey, one who had figured out how to hide behind metric tons of industrial steel and concrete, an armored plane, and a flock of high-on-Jesus, weaponized followers. 

Didn’t change the fact that she was going to find a way to pluck, stuff, and make an example of him. Put an end to his ‘Power of YES’ campaign and ensure his last sermon was his tone-deaf swansong.

God, but she hated lawyers. White man’s invention. Her people had simpler solutions for conflicts that knew how to sate the human spirit rather than drag it through miles of broken dirt.

She ruminated on this, the phone receiver pressed against her ear, trying not to let the loud ringing dictate her heart rate. She didn’t want to picture the face on the other end, either. She didn’t want a lot of things.

Out the window of the chapel, a picturesque expanse of Montanan splendor unfolded. Golden wheat fields. A great, blue dome, which, even in her newfound paranoia of planes (another white man’s invention come to genocide her, same old story), she still found time to admire creation.

On the hills to the north sat The Eyesore. John’s advertisement. Which she intended to blow up when she felt the battered people of Fall’s End needed a mood-lift. Which may be sooner than they all think. The sign represented a threat that was very much **_not_** a peacock warble, but one that promised blood. Grief. John’s usual repertoire. If anything could be said, the man had a knack for colorful death threats. He should have been a poet or a songwriter.

In the other room, to a much more somber tune, a man groaned his last. Pastor Jerome continued to read him his rites, speaking in a deep, measured voice, guiding him into whatever afterlife he believed in.

The result of John making good on one of those threats. She gnashed her teeth and raked a hand through her loose, long hair.

_Pick up the phone._

The man moaned again, softer. Each breath, each exhalation weaker than the last. A sad song she had heard far too many times in the past few days.

_I need to hear your voice again._

_...I know you want to talk to me._

Her fingers constricted the receiver. She swallowed bile and made sure no one was around to listen. The dying man had given enough already, and in his last moments he was the distraction she needed. Jerome had forbidden direct contact with Eden’s Gate from the get-go.

She should feel guilty. She didn’t.

Guilt was an easily and too often manipulated aspect of humanity, long-abused by the Seeds’ ilk to subjugate people like her.

She didn’t have precious time for that shit. She didn’t have time at all, really, and that increasing pressure spurred her to keep her head above this avalanche, crashing ever since she’d climbed into the police helicopter.

Maybe, if Joseph’s prophecy was to be believed, a lot earlier than that. Since birth. 

Finally, the ringing ceased and the line clicked, and she exhaled deeply in tandem with the man on the floor.

“Deputy,” Joseph Seed greeted. “You wanted to speak to me.”

She opened her mouth, but a fog swirling in her head robbed her of her ability to speak.

**

_For a long time—not until she’d have her own, grown children gathered around the central campfire, where it was safe to share such things— she wouldn’t tell anyone about the dream. Learning discretion, when and how to mention the subject of their dead uncles, had saved her a great deal of trouble (to say the least). She and their father had plenty of scars as a reminder of how it had been a learning process: the murky business of forgiving one another. Of learning to live with the fact that they were both terribly flawed human beings, but people who needed each other nonetheless._

_It had been a relatively simple dream: she’d gone to sleep worrying about how she would deal with the_ **_problem_ ** _of John Seed. She’d wandered an endless field clutching her hunting knife. No guns. No arrows. Driven into a blind rage by an overpowering hunger, a desire to_ **_kill_ ** _something._

 _A buffalo with a dark blue hide appeared on the horizon. It moved as swiftly as the wind, because it_ **_was_ ** _of the wind._

_For a long time, he eluded her. No matter how fast she ran, how sneaky she was, he was always one hoof ahead. Only when she got him running, then sat still amid the laughing grass, and waited, did he disappear over one horizon, to appear on the other, behind her._

_He came crashing into her, fueled by his own arrogance. All she had to do was raise that knife and drive it straight into his giant heart. His greatest weakness._

_She awoke salivating at the thought of buffalo meat. But her hunger broke into tears, which she drowned in her pillow, used it to muffle her sobs and gasps until they plagued her no longer._

_The dream was the reason she did what she did. Nothing else. Dreams came from a sacred head-space of air. She wasn’t an idiot, though. Sometimes they had meaning, sometimes they were just images in the psyche’s exhibition. Yet, she had stirred from it with her heart clamoring sorely, which she took as the dream striking a cord._

_Instead she outwardly blamed the litany of traumatic events for what set her off. A gas station fiasco happened to be the one that gave her the idea. All that fire and black smoke tainting the clean atmosphere, the broken glass and the blood sullying the nearby field. The people of the Resistance warned her not to get hot-headed and do anything brash, but John had recently christened her Wrath—she was never one to turn down a challenge—and she’d done it because decent, good people were dying, dropping like flies to the Baptist’s modern day crusade._

_She needed to do more than blow off some fucking steam by blowing shit up or ramming blockades or raiding prepper shelters for supplies and all those petty warzone tactics westerners invented._

_No, she needed to dig to the source of her emotional fury: Joseph Seed._

_John and the rest were just pieces on the board._ _Take out the king, and the game ends early._

_After the dream, said gas station disaster, she paraded herself around John’s woods, making sure she was seen as often as possible wearing the same outfit. Causing trouble, dropping a few Peggies here and there, Rambo-style, never getting caught, never inflicting the serious damage that she was capable of._

_She wasn’t a monster. That was what she had to tell herself to get some sleep._

_After a few days, she took that outfit off and stowed it away. She frisked a dead woman and donned her Eden’s Gate clothes. Then she made sure her service weapon was fully loaded and tucked an extra clip into her jeans, her ceremonial knife she’d received when she’d turned sixteen strapped to her shin in a leather sheath, and left Fall’s End before sunrise to begin her stakeout._

_In the familiar comfort of the trees, she watched his bunker. Waited. She had stirred the pot enough._ _A starving man couldn’t resist._

_Meanwhile, she hungered and thirsted plenty from her efforts, and from a well inside her that never seemed to fill no matter what she threw down it._

_She would shoot pheasants and fowl, sustaining herself on their flesh while she waited. She craved their meat more and more, the longer she was in Holland Valley. Plus, it gave her restitution, blowing things out of the sky, eating them, sucking the marrow out of their bones. No parts wasted. She used their feathers for arrows, decorations for her hair._

_That’s the sight Joseph would behold, when his men went dragging her out of the woods, kicking and screaming and spitting. He had staged a service and a mass baptism by the creek, knowing she was nearby._ _That she would be watching him like a fox watches a hen house._

_Which she had. She thought she was so clever, that she could dart between the conifers and sweet grass and remain unseen, when his men had infrared goggles watching the woods night and day. Even all the cold creek mud she’d smeared on herself didn’t disguise her enough._

_Joseph's men found her before she could sneak into camp and slit his throat._

_Her boots raked trails in the mud by the water. One of them tried to take her knife, and she bit off his ear and spat it in his face. While that man was lead to to a medic, three more stepped in, kicking and punching her into submission. He watched all of this calmly, ankle-deep in muddy water._

_One succeeded in disarming her, and she mourned the loss of her knife. Watched him sullenly and went still, the way a junkyard dog he’d known as a boy would get when you took its favorite bone away._

_Joseph didn’t even have to predict her lunge. They started to walk her towards the nearest outpost, and she went along long enough for them to relax. A few minutes. Then she broke free, wrested the knife in one quick motion from the idiot who’d clipped it to his belt like a trophy, and went barreling straight for him._

_He had stood there, hands at his sides. She’d raised that curved knife which had slit many a throat, human and animal, and charged with wild fury in her eyes, a hateful smile on her face._

_Finally, the heart of this war, within stabbing range. She could end it and be at peace and sleep at night and be whole again, no more screaming well._

_Her boots splashed water in rapidfire succession. He got his hands up just in time and prepared to catch hers._

_She sloshed violently to a halt just before him, not out of hesitation, but to build the strike, and she didn’t hesitate to swing that knife straight down towards his chest._

**_CRACK!_ **

_The marksman in the hunting blind knocked it from her hand. It went spinning into the water, and she earned herself a split finger bone._

_Splashing and yelling behind her told her the jig was up and she’d be back in Peggie custody in seconds._

_But first, oh, first._

_While the Father stood there, watching her closely from behind the glare of the aviators, she radiated a smile like a midnight sun and said,_

_“Know something? I’m gonna do what I should have done, way back in that church.”_

_“With what weapon?” he asked calmly, knowing it would set her off. And it did. Wrath licked her coal-black eyes._

_"You do not have anything to cuff me with, this time. You’re out of your depth, child. But I will help y-”_

_Partly because she needed him to shut the hell up, and because he was right, she had no weapons left, she would use the very last one she could think of in her arsenal, short of jabbing his eyes out with her thumbs._

_She grabbed him by the neck and pressed her furnace of a body against his river-soaked one, slamming her lips into his. The kiss was a twisting mockery. He pulled away, she pushed harder, then he defended himself (he would assure himself of that later, it was self-defense) by grabbing her head and pushing_ _back_ **.** _Hard._

_Clawing at him, beating against his chest, she tried to pull away. He wouldn’t let her, deepening the kiss for a split, betraying second before releasing her at last. Still pulling, she pitched backwards into the water with a womanly yelp, landing on her rump._

_She glared up at him as his men finally clapped restraints on her from behind._

_He would never ever erase that image from memory. Their first kiss._

_Wiping blood off his lip he took the lead in escorting her to captivity._

_She would escape that same night. A new record._

_**_

“Deputy,” Joseph said. “Are you with me?”

“It’s Dawn,” she gave him her name for the first time. “Enough with the Deputy shit.”

“Dawn,” he breathed, and she would never know how he was remembering the feel of her lips smashed against his and the sound she’d made when she’d fallen. “What do you want to talk about?”

No sense in wasting time. She forced the butterflies in her stomach back down.

“I ripped a page from your brother’s book. Not the one he wants, mind. He’s taken to harassing me over the radio so I’m returning the favor.”

No response.

“Hello? Joseph?”

“Go on.”

He sounded annoyed. So much for saintlike patience.

“I wanted to speak to you privately. I know you’re a man of your word.” She laid on a little flattery. A tactic she had learned for hostage situations. Did an entire county count as a hostage?

“So speak.”

“I’ll keep it short and sweet,” she said carefully. “I’m going to kill your younger brother soon, if he doesn’t stop hurting people. He fucked up, kidnapped and tortured himself a very good friend of mine. Even still, I’d rather not do it. He’s a bastard, but I want him to live. I feel sorry for him, despite all that he’s done.”

A pause. In the other room, the noises have stopped.

“So don’t. I cannot decide for you. You _know_ what is right. You _know_ killing John, who only wants to help you see the truth, is wrong.”

 _Oh, how wrong you are,_ she thought, and her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten in a day and a half. Too busy digging graves.

“Don’t _make_ me kill him,” she said through gnashed teeth. Begged.

“Dawn…listen to me closely. John is prepared to meet _whatever end_ for our cause. That is how dedicated he is.”

There it was, that wall he surrounded himself with. She would break it asunder if it killed her.

“ _You’re_ doing this. Not him. You are the ringleader. You know how it stops, don’t you?”

“How?”

At last, a genuine fucking response. She bit her lip.

“Come see me,” she pleaded quietly.

Three simple words, but she may as well have dropped a bomb. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted, what she was implying, only that it felt like the right thing to say, and she couldn’t stomach any more deceit.

“I can’t.”

She didn’t have to be a prophet to have predicted that response from him.

“Why?” she pressed. “ _Why_ can’t we talk in person? Why do we _always_ have to play games and people have to die?”

“It is meant to be this way.”

The wall just expanded to Canada. And now she was angry and crying at the same time.

“Bullshit! 

Goodbye, Joe. The next time I talk to you, your brother will be with the flies. You want that?”

Too vulgar. Too disrespectful. She wiped tears on her sleeve.

 **Click.** The line went dead. 

In the other room, all was silent and there were no more prayers to give, except one.

Jerome shook his head at her as she stormed past with her shotgun in tow.

“Dawn, I know you’re not going off in a rage when I just spoke to you about curbing those impulses.”

“I’m curbing, believe me.”

She slammed the door behind her and ran for the fields. In the evening light she took advantage of their confusion, killing more birds than she ever had in her life. One by one, they fell in clouds of feathers. She aimed for flocks, so there was a small chance of missing. But if it flew, she’d shoot. 

And shoot. And shoot. Until the gun barrel smoked and the fury abated and she could see straight again.

She took them all to Casey, needing two burlap sacks just to carry them all.

“Here,” she told him, dropping them on the floor of the kitchen of the Spread Eagle. “We can at least feed people, if we can’t do anything else.”

Casey reached in and pulled out mangled pheasant. He gave her a worried, displeased look.

“Are you joking? These are full of buckshot. They’re ruined.”

“I…”

He interrupted tersely, “I know the fucked up shit John’s doing upsets you, but if you want to go on a rampage, take it out on innocents, I’d say that makes you a hell more like them than us.”

He’d wounded her, he could see her lip trembling. After a long, tense silence, he went digging through the bag. A true chef never let anything go to waste.

“I’ll see what I can do with these. But why don’t you go see if Jerome can use you to do some actual good?”

The kitchen door was already slamming behind her. It had taken Casey’s appropriate reaction for her to realize she was still blazing mad, and another second in that place and she would have cranked the burners and lit a match and burned it to the ground.

Do something? Oh, she would do something, all right.

If she couldn’t strike at Joseph, well, there were three other weeds in the garden that needed pulling.

**

_That was a big weed._

Clutching the bloody key in her fist, she watched, like a serial killer from the bushes, as John’s men discovered his body. She never heard grown men make such sounds. They carried him away by the coattails, unceremoniously. Shamefully, as if he were passed out drunk. 

When the coast was clear she stepped out into the road and watched Nick Rye’s plane do one, final swoop before heading back to Kim and the newborn. Three lives safer, now that that monster wasn’t in the world. 

The key bit into the flesh of her palm. Good fucking riddance. He needed to be punished, to be purged, to be…

She fell to her knees, vomiting as she went, and passed out, John’s memento entombed in her fist.

**

The Resistance told her the funeral would be on the mountain, at the foot of that sign he loved so much. 

She didn’t even need to question if she should attend. All she had to do was raise her eyes to the north, and she had her answer spelled out in garish, white Hollywood letters.

This time, though, she’d keep her boots on the ground. _Fuck_ flying.

**

She felt even more like a stalker, watching the funeral from afar.

It was a surprisingly quick affair. No songs were sung, no fondness or food and drink exchanged. She had half-expected it to be a big party, celebrating in death the way he’d lived at that fancy ranch.

Waiting patiently until all other patrons had cleared, she snuck up on him at his most vulnerable: while he was knelt before his brother’s closed coffin at prayer. Bliss flowers everywhere. Incense swirling.

“I knew you’d come,” he said, before she could even think about touching him.

She stopped in her tracks.

“Well, you really _are_ a prophet.”

Smoke and incense drifted her way, making her slightly dizzy. What was she supposed to say? ‘Sorry I blasted your brother out of the sky like he was the alien in _Independence Day_ ’?

“He was a prick,” she declared. “He didn’t deserve the six rounds I plugged him with.”

(And he deserved more).

Joseph showed no outward sign of offense, of preparing to attack, or anything at all, lingering on his knees with his sleek head bowed. Dressed in his best black vest and white shirt with the rolled sleeves, the rosary wrapped in its usual place. No indication that his brother's death affected him, save for the prayers and bloodshot eyes.

“Six bullets to the torso and he still wouldn’t shut the fuck up,” she went on firing rounds, and the tears fell and she ignored them.

“He _loved_ you. He believed you. He never stopped fighting for _you_.”

She had the wounds to prove it.

At last, he turned around to stare out of the corner of his slit eye. She took a step back.

“He failed. He was a weak man. I tried to teach him true strength. But I see now I was _still_ too soft on him.”

He rose suddenly, on her in a flash. He could move with predatory speed and grace when he needed to.

“I won’t make that mistake with **you**.”

Lunging, he tackled and slammed her to the floor, ripping the breath out of her. 

Crickets chirped outside. Torches wavered. The night pressed in. They were alone, just as she knew they’d be. Just as she’d planned, but now, now she was panicking and didn’t know...

“Let go of me!”

Her wrists above her head. His hot breath against her neck, then her ear, then the other.

“Do you delight in it? Tearing my family apart? DO YOU?”

She marveled at how furious he could sound, even while whispering. The power of his voice. The rest of him overpowered her, too. She underestimated that lithe body of his.

“I...I...” she could only stammer, crying too hard. Trapped in the cage they built for one another and now they were physically at each other’s throats. He put a hand around hers, squeezing. Hard. No breath.

“In _wrecking_ all that we try to build?”

The fear in her eyes gave him pause. His grip softened. Slightly. He was far from finished and he needed her to hear _every syllable_ of hatred he had for this vile murderess, this temptress.

“Do you want to **_die_ ** so _badly_ when the world goes up in flames and none of this even matters?”

She somehow found the strength to shake her head against the stones.

“It’s not true. It’s not true. _Liar_.”

He let his grip go slack, but kept his hand on her throat. He began stroking down the side of it, the way one would soothe a crying child.

“The only liar I see is you. Lying to yourself.”

He released her entirely and stood up. His absence mortified her. How empty. How cold and bloodless. Beneath him, fighting him, she had felt alive. _Fulfilled_.

It offended her so much, when he gave her a dismissive turn of his back and tried to storm out, she cut him off. Her slap knocked his aviators off, but it didn’t catch him off guard. He always seemed to be hyper aware of her movements.

He caught her wrist before she could retract it and yanked her against him so hard, he had to lift his chin to avoid her forehead smashing him. She inhaled his scent and felt his heat and it was not from him choking her seconds ago that she couldn’t get enough breath.

“You want this of me?” he murmured, his lips hovering above hers. “At my own brother’s _funeral_?"

“I don’t kn-ah!”

He took her by the throat again and she truly feared he would destroy her there. 

“Let me show you, then, what _I_ want.”

**

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

On the floor, him on top. A continuation of the kiss from the river, plenty of malice and struggle for control, but something else, too. The words spill out of her along with her tears.

“I know,” he told her, his lips against her ear. His beard rubbed her face, neck, chin and the tops of her breasts raw. “I know…”

“How can you forgiv-”

He cut her off with a kiss. Before they got any further, he pushed himself up, staring straight into her frightened, cavernous eyes.

“Because I’m in love with you.”

He went back to kiss her on the lips, and she pressed all of herself into it, willing some kind of osmosis, absorption into all that muscle and flesh. That hollowness blissfully silent for the first time in her life.

He began unbuttoning his vest, his shirt, as she peeled hers up and off. They _must_ feel and taste each other’s skin, even there. Even then.

They only ever kissed once, and it was malicious. Mostly. She had memorized his scent from being so close and the weight and feel of his body and went to town in her tent that night so vigorously Jess gave her shit about it in the morning, asked who she was thinking about and she lied on the spot and told her Sharky.

Really, fucking Sharky.

She laughed. Loud and braying, like a jackass, and stopped him from taking off her bra, slapping his hand, like a brand against her skin.

“You _love_ me? You don’t even _know_ me.”

He pushed her hand away and slipped his hand under, seizing her nipple. Her skin’s immediate reaction and her gasp told him all he needed to know.

“You feel the same."

“I don’t know _what_ I feel.” She let her hands rest above head, her hair splayed in an inky fan. “Except scared.”

He slid his hand back out to cup her face, placing a covetous kiss on her lips.

“I can help with that,” he whispered, feather soft.

She shivered.

**

Inside her, their bodies joined on the floor, entwined and caught in a horizontal dance of flesh and thrusts and sighs. The blossoms dangling above the coffin, swaying.

He stopped for a moment, gathering himself again. All around him she squeezed, pulling every inch he had to offer inside, against. Her face was turned away in shame.

So much they should not, would not look at. He didn’t. He only ever looked through her.

“ _Look_ at me. I won’t let the flames get you.”

He turned her face gently towards his. For once, she obeyed. Their eyes locked, the last piece to the puzzle.

They finished together in a mutual exchange of breath and soft moans, a merging of his spilled seed and her insatiable want. 

Somewhere in the night, a mourning dove cried.

**

A few seconds after, she forced him out of her, scooped up an armful of her clothes, and scrambled to her feet.

"Wait."

He tried to pull her back down with him, but she spat like a cornered cat, ripping free. He let his arm drop, got up, and watched her leave.

She fled past the circle of torchlight, into the wall of darkness. Running, and she would not stop until her lungs felt like they would collapse and her legs gave out. She wouldn't even remember pulling on her clothes.

But she would remember John's funeral as long as she lived. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get the boxed wine and the processed cheese whizz and crackers, cuz we trash now. Your brother's funeral, Joseph? Really? Smh.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my final love letter to Daddy Joe and the Deputy, the fic I always wanted to write but didn't have the time. It was originally intended as a oneshot, but I'm splitting up the chapters for sake of all our eyes. <3
> 
> I hope you enjoy and that it's not too cheesy. I wanted to stay away from super dark stuff (my Dead by Daylight fic is about to get REAL fuckin' midnight-squirrely, hoo boy) and to write something that felt wholesome and organic, with just the right amounts of dysfunctional and wrong. ;)


End file.
